Bitcoin and Philosophy (Session 6)

Hello and welcome everyone to the sixth session of Nick Lant's Bitcoin and Philosophy Seminar. I'm going to pass it on to Nick to begin his lecture. Okay, cool. So the preset topic for this week was cryptography, or especially concentrating on the crypto aspects. of that I'm so I was thinking we could have a little preliminary discussion of public key cryptography I'm and then I've got a couple of pieces

in the classroom that both I think could be really a stimulating folk I for conversations I got something from I then which actually was raising something that I think has been coming up a lot understandably I've been sort of kicking it down the road which is this whole question about the relation of this Bitcoin topic to what is perhaps the most excited philosophical discourse on finance currently which is I think can be really traced back to Ali Ayash. Ivan actually refers to

John Roth, if I'm pronouncing his name right, who's who's one of the writers in the Collapse volume. I enjoyed his piece a lot in that volume. I don't know much about his work beyond that. But it definitely seems to me there is, even though it's a very complicated bridge to cross I think there's enough that should to stop at least understanding the terms of that crossing and how one would begin to move between these two different types of discussion and the second piece or the second actually set of stimulus came from Laura on stuff that we talked about last time

now she sent three different links and I'm afraid the only one that I'm at all on top of at this stage is the first of them which is a link to Brett Scott's article that was alluded to last time because of the fact that he'd said he'd criticized the notion of money as a store value now I actually recognized this article when I saw it I've the first time I looked at it was I was not reading it very carefully and I looked at a little bit more carefully this time but there's also plenty there to trigger a set of discussions

and he makes three particular points what he calls myths about money that need to be dispelled and they're all at least interesting if I think in certain respects and his an ambiguous attitude to all of them is to me a little bit hasty but we can see what people think about that so and if it's okay with people I thought we'd start with the cryptographic topic and then perhaps move on to these other ones along with anything else that people want to introduce. So, right from the start

I have included on our syllabus a link to this 1976 paper by Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman called New Directions in Cryptography dating all the way back to 1976, which I guess to a lot of people seems like ancient history now. I would say that this essay which is actually a lot more demanding than the Bitcoin paper but is probably the second most important

reference on the reading at least in terms of its direct relevance to this thing and I think understanding public key cryptography at least to some extent and I'm not at all pretending to have an exceptional mastery of it. I mean I'm basically Wikipedia level of understanding of public key cryptography but I think that's already enough from my point of view to be quite astounded by the importance of that and to see firstly how it's absolutely fundamental to the possibility of Bitcoin as well as many other things and secondly how its

historical importance is really hard to overestimate I mean it's just quite extraordinary advance in in I don't know how you want to categorize it in human culture in general or something more than that maybe we want to try and pin down later and I think the best way of understanding quite how important it is is that it's comparable in certain ways to a bunch of things that have a very similar historical structure.

And the two obvious ones, I think, that have exactly the shape to them is the history of logic and the history of money. Now obviously this last one I'm going to say I'm going to use bitcoin basically as the example of that. The history of logic, simply to say that people talking about girdle, girdle coding and the kind of revolution that he introduced in the 1930s to do with the understanding of the possibility it doesn't not just I station about my next I'm attempted to say something like

you know he's one of the to you greatest logicians in history along with Aristotle then a pause and then say no he's the greatest tradition history and that the the deep structure fat is that I'm there's really a prehistory which goes all the way up to girl and then there's this massive break and then there's something that is truly modern happens up and you look for your ancient authorities and that people who really systematize a certain kind of common sense that you know Aristotle of course is used as a reference because he

tells us what everyone thinks logic has to be like in a way that is convincing I'm but it you only get the counterintuitive break at this last stage where something happens that no one could have predicted and that you have a subject that has lasted for thousands of years with minor refinements and slight nudges and transformations and then at a certain point it undergoes this catastrophic rupture and you're in a totally different world so the whole long long arc that is and can be condensed in a certain way by the attempt to understand the relationship

between arithmetic and logic slowly slowly closing on this possibility of producing a logical system for arithmetic that seems to be heading towards some you know state of perfection where people think that almost they always got there and obviously in these famous names like Russell and Piano in there in I'm early 20th century it looks like it's finally just about to write and then good all comes along as this is totally misconceived and he says in such a way that it is then defitting you know that whole historical project has become has been obsolesced and everything that it was

trying to do is now seen as being misconceived in this fundamental way and the history of cryptography is exactly the same structure in the sense that you can take the history back as far as you want before public key cryptography and it has a continuity to it there are all kinds of refinements and minor transformations but the fundamental history of cryptography is a single story until you get to public key cryptography and then it completely is revolutionized in a way no one had imagined before and so if you're trying to identify what the principle of cryptography is

prior to public key cryptography The term that is used and is extremely helpful, it's a nice coinage because it is helpful and makes a lot of sense and captures the essence of the thing, is that all cryptography was symmetrical until you get to public key or asymmetric cryptography. So what is meant by symmetry there, it's actually very simple. The principle and the assumption of what it was for cryptography to operate, what a code, a cipher in that sense was, is that between the message and the crypto version of that

between the plain text and the ciphertext, there is a difference that is described by a key. And there are all different kinds of candidates for this key. There are kind of letter substitutions, there are this old Roman way of winding a message around a stick of a certain width and the way the amount of revolutions it did around that automatically encrypted the message. There's obviously very secure forms of symmetrical encryption using one-time pads where there is no cipher except for that message that is based on a particular

key that is required by both parties. And everybody throughout, again, those thousands of years, I mean it's probably a history longer than the history of an attempt to formalize logic, just assumed that of course cryptography was symmetrical. It was something that just seemed to be implicit in the very idea of cryptography. And that following from that, if you were able to encrypt a message, you were automatically able to decrypt it and

vice versa. There's a key, and the key transforms between a ciphertext and a plain text symmetrically, And therefore, if you could do one of these operations, you could do the other one inevitably and obviously and clearly. So that's one of the fundamental characteristics of symmetrical cryptography. Cryptography, as it has always been until 1976. The other characteristic that follows from that is that in order to have a crypto system, you have to have, I think what can be fairly called, a conspiracy.

The people who are involved in the cryptographic exchange must get together outside the system. I mean, it's tempting if we're translating between the language of transcendental philosophy and these vocabulary is to say they have to enter a transcendent space outside the system and exchange the key so that they both actually, the act by which the key is shared is an act that takes place outside of the cryptographic economy that the key makes possible. You cannot communicate key cryptographically

if you send it to some in code they are key and let's say they can't use it or if that you sent it to them in a way that they could access the key from the message then anyone could access the key message and therefore it would be insecure so there's no way with a symmetrical cryptographic system that you can actually in enter into a a cryptographic exchange without a conspiratorial moment outside of that circuit of cryptographic communication now just practically speaking that obviously becomes a huge problem if there is a requirement for widespread crypto communication

because it's okay if you're a secret agent that you somehow get together with the people you're going to be communicating with before your mission starts and therefore you've got the code they've got the code and then the mission starts and you've got your little cryptographic microeconomy it just involves a limited number of people with something stillable but if you're engaged in commercial crypto communication if you want to send payments cryptographically to some large company with millions of anonymous customers it's completely impractical to use an asymmetric I mean to use a symmetrical cryptographic system to to engage in that exchange

so the big change then that was and this was independently invented and Diffie, Hellman, they also, Hellman in particular, also said that Ralph Merkel, who you've come across from the Merkel Tree contribution and maybe some other some other elements, he's obviously very active in this whole world. So Hellman says it should be called Diffie, Hellman, Merkel Key Exchange, but it was independently invented a little bit just one year later by a team at MIT which is

Ron Rivest sorry let me just look at this Rd Shamir and Leonard Edelman and their names were used then for the acronym of that which is RSA encryption which I'm sure everybody has heard of so it's one of those things like calculus and innumerable other sort of massive breakthroughs that have this strange coincidental origin in that way, independent invention. But irrespective of that, the basic idea is this, and the reason it's called asymmetric is that the actions of encryption and decryption become broken in asymmetric

cryptography and it becomes broken on the basis of a particular type of double key. So rather than a single key, all symmetrical encryption has a single key, asymmetric encryption has a double key. And the two sides of that key are mathematically bonded. They have a deep connection to each other, and you'll see the function of that as we talk about it. mathematically bonded but between those two sides of the key, the two keys, that the relation is asymmetrical because it's easy to go in one direction and extremely difficult to go

in the other direction. And we've already seen that asymmetry is cropping up over and over and over and over again here. I mean I'm always tempted to see it as an index of time at work in these systems. We've seen that there's a for the various forms of entropy and sorry of irreversibility tempts people I think often interestingly and productively to introduce this thermodynamic discussion that we're talking about an irreversibility of the same kind as any kind of entropic process that can go towards disorder but cannot be moved back to order practically. And it's also, as we've seen, that the form of the

contract in general as a commitment also involves a notion of asymmetry. That the ideal, the model contract is facile to enter into and hard stroke impossible to back out of. That's implicit in a contract, that all of these tendencies towards fluid, frictionless commercial interaction require that it's extremely easy to make a deal, but once you've made a deal you can't retract that deal. So there's an asymmetric relationship that is intrinsic to the very notion of commercial exchange.

And here we have another type of asymmetry. And the asymmetry here is between a mathematical function that connects these two keys. The facile key, we could say the simple key, is your public key. and bonded to that is a private key and you cannot derive the private key from the public key tractably. So what we're really seeing here is a whole new way of hiding things, a way of hiding things that has never previously been entertained in the history of cryptography

and by that I think we mean history. It's a completely new and hiding which I'm very inclined to call the open secret. The open secret is the same thing we see in Bitcoin It's the same thing we see in Bitcoin on the ledger, in the fact that everything is completely exposed, and yet you still are able to engage in hidden activities. Hidden in that case, because it's based on this cryptographic system, and more directly, because your real-life identity is hidden outside of the actual system of commercial exchange that Bitcoin realizes.

The open secret in public key cryptography is realized by the fact that your public key can be completely exposed and it works best if it is totally exposed to public circulation. So in this way it works like your public address. When I say it works like, I mean these analogies, it's because there is the same technical mechanism behind it. So it's like your public address within the Bitcoin system. The more people know it, the better. If you want people to be able to pay you Bitcoins, you tell everybody your public address. In the same way with public key encryption, if you want to be able to communicate with

people cryptographically, you put your public key on your business card. You share it, you put it up on the web, you completely hide it. The more you publicize it, the better. And your private key, just like your private Bitcoin address, is kept strictly to yourself. And as I say, you're able to do this because your private key cannot be derived from your public K even though they are bonded together and the example that I find because

as I say my level technical immersion in this is woefully limited but I think the example that is easiest to understand and it's the one historically that and first it was actually anticipated by Jeffens way back in the 19th century in 1870 for is prime number factorization so that if you have to we don't need to go for massive crypto security strikes our example if you want to go for if you have to largest crimes you know say just 10 digits each and you can multiply them together with a calculator even

with a piece of paper pretty fast but using the same technology that you used to encrypt if you then try to decrypt by then extracting those primes from the product of their combination from the part of their combination it takes vastly vastly longer I mean without a I suspect a really powerful computer can deal with 10-digit primes but the amount of computation that will be required would be billions and billions and billions calculations in order by brute force

by trying out every plausible prime number and therefore using this technique called Erastothenesis net which is the only is the brute force method for prime factorization you it would eventually find it but there is the key point is that there is a vast vast asymmetry between the ease the encryption and the ease of the decryption if you don't have the key that anyone can do can multiply these two times together and then they're faced with a number that they know it hold has only two prime factors each of 10 digits

that say to make easier and it would take you unassisted vastly longer than the age of the universe to extract those extractors prime numbers out of the number and and even a powerful computer takes huge huge amounts of computational effort and if you make them a little bit longer you can make it impractical even for the most powerful supercomputer to do that reversal while leaving the original task multiplying two largest crimes together extremely extremely simple so that's this example other of a asymmetric mathematical relationship and you can see from that it has everything

it works that people use other methods you know them the one that Bitcoin uses is this thing called elliptical curve cryptography and I can only trust because this is what I'm told by what I'm reading that the abstract principle is the same, the abstract principle being that there is a massive asymmetry between the facility of encryption and the facility of decryption. So you can see if you have a public and a private key related by this kind of mathematical relationship they are bonded utterly and precisely together. There's no...

They're bonded so closely together that you obviously generate the public key out of the private key originally, and they're bonded together so closely that it will allow a whole bunch of operations, of which the most important we're just about to move on to. But even though there is this bond, it's completely inaccessible to anybody who has access to the public side of that pair. So you can float your public key with any concerns, and your private key, while attached to it inseparably, like a sort of dark twin, is not actually accessible.

And so as I say, this relationship between the public and private, the light and dark side of a cryptographic couple is a new understanding of secrecy. it's something that had never been anticipated before but with it everything becomes possible in the world where discussing I mean the most straightforward things that already deeply entrenched is the whole infrastructure conventional online commerce

you know forget about cryptocurrencies just talk about PayPal or talk about even using your credit card to engage in online payments anything of that kind that involves you entering into a crypto protected relationship with a stranger in a public communication channel is now feasible and this is a this is a huge thing I mean it's complete something that was completely impossible to achieve in advance of this step forward. So I'm going to stop on this in one second. I just want to say the two crucial functions, once you've got your public and private key,

you can do a whole bunch of clever things by combining them in certain ways. And the most, there's two that are particularly important. So the first thing, everyone talks about Alice and Bob. I think it's because of the A and B thing there. So I might as well stick with convention. We've got Alice and Bob who are trying to engage in crypto communication. So the first thing is that Alice wants to send Bob an encrypted message. Now as I say, the only way in the prehistory of cryptography, in the symmetrical epoch

of cryptography, that this could happen is if Alice and Bob conspire. At some point outside of the ecumenon or outside the commercium or however you want to describe it, the system, they have to get together and engage in an exchange such that they both share a key that they both then are able to keep secret. In public key cryptography that's unnecessary. All that is required is that Bob finds Alice's public key and uses it to encrypt a message and sends it to Alice.

Now, because the system is asymmetric, Alice's public key cannot decrypt that message. Obviously, if it could, then there would be no cryptographic protection at all. Her public key is out there. Anyone can take it. They can take Alice's public key, get the message, use it, and decrypt the message. But the way PKC works is only Alice's private key will decrypt a message encrypted using her public key. So you can take a message, use Alice's public key, use that to encrypt the message,

and then plaster that message everywhere completely openly. like obviously the blockchain its there's no it's a totally open secret you can say tantalize people I am sending Alice a secret message of extreme importance that everyone would be fascinated by I'm using nothing to encrypt it but her public key here it is bump fuel think the only person who can decrypt that message is the person who has Alice's private key we will assume Alex so this allows

secure crypto communication cross a public channel and it's something that just simply hadn't been seen as being possible prior to this revolution in cryptography. The other thing that you can do, which is almost as important, is digital signatures. And as we've seen with Bitcoin, the notion of a signature becomes extremely important in this recent phase of cryptography. I mean, the notion of a signature has always been extremely important.

It's always been a mark of identity. And it's obviously used prior to this kind of level of sophistication, very blurry forms of bio-identification, you know, your signature. Let's assume no one can forge your signature plausibly. I mean, people were not in a position to do iris scans or complicated forms of these bio-identification so they use these very very crude and what look now very hazy forms of identification through things that are supposed to be marks of your biological

identity that can't be forged but obviously just like the problem of putting money into cyberspace the problem of putting identity into cyberspace falls prey to what we've been seeing on the monetary side as the double spending problem like its the whole medium is designed for near free copying so how can you possibly have a form of identity on the web that is secure that is a that acts as a reliable signature and this is a huge serious problem but it's one again that's solved by public key cryptography and in this case

a you reverse the thing and if you want to and provide a signature you use your private key and you send a message in your private key and it can only be extracted by someone who has your public key now that could be anybody so it's the opposite of a crypto communication a signature is not meant to be kept secret it's like if you sign something it's not that you want your signature is any kind of secret Watson what the relation that's important there is that your signature cannot be forged that you're proving

identity and you prove identity by because the fact is if you sign something to just sheet using your private key your public key will show that it was you who signed it or the person who signed it had to have been someone with access to your private key so ownership of your private key becomes the key the principle of identity. It's the kind of bottom line at this stage. There's nothing more basic to being you than this relationship of cryptographic propriety over a private key. And this too, as you can imagine, is of extraordinary importance to be able to actually prove irreversibly

irreversibly and definitively that you sign something that the only way in which you could not have been the person who signed it is if you let someone else steal your private key and obviously then you're basically saying you let someone steal your identity. So I think rather than just carrying on indefinitely with this because there are other things we want to talk about. kind of draw a close to this particular block at this point and see whether anyone has anything they want to discuss about public key cryptography

Nick I'm quiet because I'm still trying to figure out the relationship between private and public and conceptualize it in my mind how they work yes it's wrong it is something that takes a bit of mental juggling I think I mean if there's anything I can do to try and clarify I would probably be repeating but can sometimes be helpful I'm I think the important thing to remember is that I mean public and private key are rigidly bonded together that the private key is the hidden part of the relation and it's hidden because of the fact that there's an asymmetric difficulty of getting from one to the other to get from the private key to the public key is not a problem

but to get to the private key from the public key is all but impossible and because a key pair there and you can put the public key out in the public domain, it means that if you encrypt something with a public key, it requires decryption by the corresponding private key. And so on one side you can use that to prove, if you start by encrypting something with a private key, you can prove who encrypted that. That's the digital signature option. Or if, say, Mo, I wanted to send you a message that was secure, I would find your public key. You could just simply put it with your ID somewhere on the net.

I would look at it. I would read your public key. I would take my message and I would use your public key to encrypt a message to you. Now the only message that could then be decrypted is with your private key. So this means that I can send you without us ever having conspired, without us ever having entered into any kind of relationship, private, offline relationship in which we have exchanged some kind of cryptographic protocol with each other, transcendently I would say in Kantian mode, without any of that being necessary, I just by seeing your public key and by you having a private key, I can send you an entirely secure crypto communication.

Obviously then, if you wanted to then reply to me, you would need my public key. I can't get, if you encrypt something using your public key, no one can get to it but you. So if you want to send a message to me, you need my public key, and then I have to use my private key to decrypt it. But if you wanted to prove who you were to me, you would use your private key, and then anybody could use your public key, and that would prove beyond any doubt that you were the person who had signed that document. Can I make a comment on this kind of idea of the open secret sort of in general?

Yeah. Sorry, I've got some cat interference. perhaps outside of the Bitcoin or the blockchain mechanism in which this is perfectly important. Isn't the kind of, the importance of having two levels of language, of having an esoteric and an exoteric level of language, the fact that there is a possibility to decipher it if only you have the right kind of knowledge or you've earned it or you've figured it out in some way or you've been initiated into certain... realms of knowledge that give you the tools to decipher it. And so you become party to the secret through a kind of labor,

but one that is possible. So there is a symmetry, but it's a very specific qualified symmetry. And so the whole kind of game of employing these two levels of communication or transmission is to be able to work both to make it intelligible esoterically, but not transparent esoterically. Yeah. And so, again, this is my problem with the temporality as an asymmetrical temporality in terms of production, that there's a kind of shutting down of a lot of the fun possibilities in this,

in the fact that it is so kind of rigidly structured. Secure. Yeah. I mean, this is really just an aesthetic point. Sure. And I would say about that that, like, you know, I'm not going to explore your financial circumstances, but I'm pretty sure that there's a certain level where you don't want people engaging in aesthetic experimentation with your bank account. And so there is that level of a sort of kind of absolutized asymmetry. I mean, it clearly isn't absolute ever in a kind of strictly conceptual sense.

It's, you know, we're talking about, you know, you can, it's always a quantitative increase in security and you can say, look, this would take the biggest supercomputer in the world 50 trillion years to break or whatever. No, let's make it 100 trillion years. No, let's make it 200 trillion years. I mean, but you never get to infinite security in a purely conceptual way. But you get so far beyond what can be played with that it might as well be absolute. But there's no reason why this whole spectrum needs to be down at this quasi-absolute end, except that we're dealing with certain practical problems where people are only interested in that end.

It's like a... Let me give you an example. little them quote I don't know whether people saw it it's my I think right now and perhaps ever that I have to see that that is my favorite quote in the whole history philosophy and Mike I'm absolutely a hopeless a classical languages so I'm not making any pretense at this but I I struggled a bit just because I I love it so much which is this quote from Heraclitus crucis cryptisthi philae, meaning, translated usually as nature loves to hide, but you can see even with my level of grotesque incompetence in classical languages that this to hide,

cryptisthi, is the root, shares the root of cryptography. It's a kind of sign that there's cryptographic problem at the absolute origin of Western philosophy. Now that is fragment 1, 2, 3 of Heraclitus. And fragment 1, 2, 3 is a very interesting number because it actually is like a toy version of the kind of prime number based cryptographic asymmetry we've been talking about. It's an extremely insecure one, which means you should like it. It means it's aesthetically accessible

because 1, 2, 3 has two prime factors, 3 and 41. So it's a little model of that asymmetry, And it's maybe a little bit hard to see because it is so far from the absolute end we've been talking about. If a good piece of RSA encryption would take a supercomputer 20 trillion years to solve, fragment 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3 would take it some fraction of a nanosecond to solve. But it means it's in our aesthetic play zone. you know there's a whole that aesthetic play zone is as large as you want it to be you know so these numerical

relationships aren't all you don't need to be dealing with 10 digit 20 digit 30 digit primes you can be dealing with in this case a two digit digit prime and one digit prime I mean and the reason I'm saying this is that obviously the kind of occult traditions that have played around with these things are in this side maybe a little these you know they swim a little bit deeper and but they don't swim down to the sense deep cryptographic security they swim down to us and where someone who involves themselves in playing the game can encrypt and decrypt these messages all make sense of that

and someone and the people the vast majority of the audience who simply are not involved in that game will be I'm each a at from in science I kept out of its esoteric a dimension so I guess what I'm saying is like an you know the reason that these things seem hard in the sense you're using that word hardened rigid is because of the application and the application demands a certain quantitative dimension

that is not intrinsic to the the abstract machinery that we're talking about that quantitative level is a fact that you're talking about 128 bit encryption is not it isn't intrinsic any abstract cryptographic protocol it simply to make it secure because people want money to be secure they want to be able to pass messages that are truly secure to each other but there's a whole playground all low security cryptographic procedures and they're not they're completely open to people and they're available to use and I would say have been systematically used I think the obvious example, as I say, is in various kinds of occult sign systems.

Thanks. So the potential to encrypt strange attractors or like truly conductive signs, I don't know if that's the right word, is fully strengthened by this. it could be revolutionary in a way that we haven't seen happen as fast as anything does on the internet now is that something like what you're suggesting? actually I'm not

fully getting, can you just try to gloss that by a fractionally different way so we've reached a level of asymmetrical encryption that is flawless and a message can be sent that can only be decrypted if the intent is there and the person encrypting it at a non transcendental level then can't you isn't there much greater potential for proliferation of I said strange attraction But I mean for more, I said more conductive, I don't know, symbols is the word I said.

I guess I have to think through this a little more. But it's just interesting to me that you are now capable of transmitting really big, serious sets of information instantly with complete security. Yeah, definitely. I mean, it obviously depends what your sort of application is. And where Amy's coming from is a very different application to the one that is the mainstream application of the topic we're talking about. And so I think there's a certain frustration on that side. But my response to that, and I'm sorry, I'm just probably being repetitive here, is that

there's nothing intrinsic in the machinery that is producing a partition here. The partition is totally quantitative, and it's just because people have dialed up the security of the encryption to a point that's functional for these particular applications. and there's a whole unexplored zone with and I agree totally with Amy on this it's just a massively the potential of this as an aesthetic playground is fast if you dial it back down again you know and by dialing back down obviously we're in a way leaving our we're leaving our topic we're leaving Bitcoin we're leaving

cryptocurrency and we're turning it into something else by you know what are these cultural machines if they are being applied at extremely low levels of crypto security a but just in order to to invest can explore and play with these semiotic machines which are extremely intrinsically powerful or they can do these weird strange things that I think people have not you know I think that's a missing zone of cultural experimentation personally you know I think there's a lot of extremely advanced productive experimentation happening up at this high security end am but I think down at the low security and

where it's really being used as a just an object to aesthetic involvement its completely open to being used there but I just don't see a lot yet happening I kind and I guess I'm just trying to say there's no reason why it shouldn't happen and its its yeah I guess it tie it back to what we're saying last week I was just thinking it could be not just aesthetically fascinating but it could undermined you know the institution or the Academy a could provide for a lot of a interesting academic development even all kinds of stuff but are I'm running on so thanks for your reply

at any stage where people want us to just jump forward to one of these other topics just just give some kind of indication I mean it's definitely possible always to get back can I just are sorry to just pick on any but what does soz actually mean? is that in some kind of code? sorry sorry maybe sorry for dragging me ok I've just got 11 o'clock soz ok it's Australian I don't have to try and numerise it or break it down into prime factors

or anything like that no but maybe I'm going to Well, I guess we could talk about the Swan paper if anyone's interested in that. Sorry, which one are we talking about? The thing Ivan linked to, this John Roth thing or Laura's Brett Scott paper? I was looking at the brain as a decentralized autonomous organization paper but oh yeah I might have been

okay no that sounds great but I think I might need some homes about what's going in there yeah no this is Miller Melanie Swan saying is that mm-hmm give me the ref again to that yeah I don't I know I know it's called blockchain thinking yeah yeah I know where we are now I see yeah yeah well is it I'll let you take take the lead if you if you want to go in that direction but I was interested paper yeah no to do do go ahead for sure yeah any comments you have

on that? Well, I mean, you know, the proof of intelligence is most problematic to me. I mean, we definitely have, like, proofs of knowledge or knowledges, and her definition of thinking as computation is one we've seen, but that's also, you know, what we use for what we use for an algorithm. But it was attractive to me too. Just the notion of I don't know, uploading mind files or that's a VR thing that is pretty intriguing. Mind uploads or personal connectome files as she calls it. And so that was

the potential in the blockchain architecture that I'll just fascinating to me yeah no I thought a paper was absolutely fascinating definitely it's its one of the most but whether one whatever points at one agrees with or disagrees with or is appalled by or whatever its as a piece of s philosophical stimulation it was just extraordinary and I'll so Yes, sorry, this is from this paper we were talking about, Chris has brought it up, is

Melanie Swan's paper that there's a link to on the classroom. Sorry, is that Mo? Yeah. Yes, I had to step away for a second. I just missed a reference. Yeah, yes, that's right. It's already on there. Chris was just talking about it. Thank you. That's why it came up. Actually though, I think if it's okay with you, Chris, we've got scheduled a I'm focus next week I think on them on the whole proof-of-work question

I'm using that as a kind of even some of these questions how and and and reopening this politics a bit quite a bit at a high level abstraction and I think that that context would be very good for the swan pace so I'm sort of tempted to kick that can down the road one week. I agree. I have a general question. Sounds wonderful. Yes. Related, at least a little bit to cryptography, when you were speaking about identity and the idea of protecting your identity, it makes sense in the sense of having a bank account or a digital wallet,

and you want to protect somebody from taking your money and making sure the exchange of money is secure. But I was thinking just generally about the stealing of identity and the duplication of identities in the public digital sphere, such as on Facebook, where somebody will steal your images and pretend to be you. Yeah. And then specifically, because I'm really into the music, I was thinking about MP3s and the stealing of music. And I was just wondering, are there any examples, and if not, why not, of people trying to implement a kind of public ledger within music files or for images so that you can trace which ones are illegal copies and which ones have been bought and so forth.

Because it seems kind of, I mean, I don't know how difficult or unrealistic it is, but, you know, possible. Actually Ian, I think that that is a very fully articulated goal of certain sidechain applications, you know, sort of application that people would click onto the blockchain precisely in the way that you're saying, as a proof of creation or using that whole proof identity structure to stamp something with your authorial or creative signature. So I

think that that is definitely going to happen. So far as the whole thing moves on at all, I think we can be totally confident that that is an application that we will see happening because I've seen it as an acknowledged objective already. And I think that you're right to say the technology should totally... That's going with the grain of the technology to a huge extent. There's nothing that should be particularly onerous about that. So all of these credentialing operations to do with a proof of identity at a certain time,

obviously as we know the blockchain at its fundamental thing is this time stamping system to say that at time X this happened and the thing that happened has a signature attached to it. Remember also a coin is just a string of signatures. So the kind of thing you're suggesting is something that is extremely locked into the basic mechanism of the blockchain for sure. Right. Yeah, it's just I find it, the idea as we were talking about with the idea of, your idea of commutative or commutation is, I'm just trying to think how relevant it is here because we're not talking about money.

so is that does that principle apply to say a music file the notion of commutation I mean especially if there's no limit to how many nobody says oh I'm only going to make 10,000 of these mp3s of this particular song yeah that's an interesting question I mean I think we get back to this thing that anything that's using the blockchain is a coin. So this suffix, X coin, Y coin, whatever coin. So this would be, as I say, I could, if I looked,

I searched the web for a little bit, I'm sure I could find there is a coin that's already doing this. But I would just make one up on the spot and say this is like ID coin or whatever, OK? So ID coin does exactly the things that you're saying. But it is a coin. It must be if it's going to use the blockchain. And in order to be a coin, it has to have this economic dimension to it to some extent. So, now these systems, there's a very interesting one called Namecoin that is supposed to ultimately put the whole of the web address system on.

Would totally get rid of the... OK, sorry, there's a bit of weird stuff going on. I think you're muted. Yes, it would get rid of the whole, the currently existing internet institutions to do with domain name registration or whatever and just put the whole of that machinery onto the onto the blockchain so it's not exactly the same as what you're saying but there is a kind of structural relationship to that but that too would be a certain it's name coin it's a certain type of coin and therefore it has an

ineliminable economic element to it so I think because it's only going to work if if people have if not mining then something that is an analogous to mining it isn't economic incentive to maintain and reproduce the system so if you try to take the element out then this simply those guarantees that the system depends upon are taken out to and it simply what works so you have to somehow be you have to have that enough of a a speck of economic reality there to provide incentives for people to reproduce

the system so how that would work exactly in this identity system I think is a an interesting an inch informant I think it would be you would have to spend some micro particle of this coin system in order to stamp your creations with your identity I think it's that that's what those coins would be for and and it would be that now one of the key things obviously a Bitcoin and all of them is that they're fractional or to an extreme extent you know you can at the moment break down a bit quite a million pieces if need necessary

I they could do a soft fork to give you some more divisibility than that so this is very easy for the systems to do anything about micro payments in these microscopic economic functions and I think that that what you would have to do in this this system is you would have to somehow require these ID coins, it would involve some kind of payment, and then you would spend them by stamping your production in such a way that they then became indelibly identified. Great, thank you.

Yeah, this thing from Amy is very relevant up here. I'll stick the link in the classroom for you later, Ian. Yeah. It kind of relates to the conversation that Mo was having with Dana in the classroom as well. I was going to stick it up there before, but I didn't really have to. But yeah, I think there's a whole kind of another conversation that can take place in relation to art and intellectual property as well.

Yes. Yes. Yes. I think also the same applies to the previous point, that there's a high security version that people will want for the obvious applications. Like if you were buying ID coin because you wanted to stamp your music or whatever it was with an indelible identity, you would probably want it to be secure but there's nothing about it that couldn't allow all kinds of strange artistic games with identity to take place it's just that you don't have to have to dial the security index down to a level where it became open to various kind of chaotic effects of

various kinds. And obviously if you did that there'd be no point complaining if something happened that looked like an unpredictable type of identity theft that you didn't welcome. This is a really loose kind of connection and something that I haven't thought out properly, but I was wondering with the kind of the stuff we were talking about the other week about mainstreaming. Yeah. And is there a kind of advantage in the, I mean the fact that we're talking about something that is totally secure, there is no level of deception involved, and the traction that

kind of appearance can have in terms of this goal, perhaps, depending on who you talk to, of Bitcoin going mainstream. Right. It's not a kind of coup in any sense. It's a complete open assertion of a system and its advantages rather than a kind of takeover from behind. I don't know, this is just something that I kind of thought of really roughly. Sorry, when you say it's not a coup. Sorry, did I just interrupt somebody? Sorry, did I just shout over somebody then? No, I just wanted to get a clarification.

It isn't a coup. What's it there? The mainstreaming of Bitcoin. Right. yeah I mean I don't know I don't know what to sense yeah but both sides are equally I'm equally infused by the possibility for absolute hard crypto in this up I mean you know you've got on the one hand these altars that the cypher-punk guys and they absolutely totally uncompromising I mean you know to just be I am to just be stereotypical about it or stereotyping about it I mean

let's say they all have their tinfoil hats on they all think that the NSA is trying to break into their I occasions and empty their Bitcoin wallets I mean those guy is the anti mainstreamers on no less attached to the most radical hard cryptographic security as the mainstreamers are. I think both sides of that debate are attached to absolute crypto security or as close, you know, when I say absolute crypto security, I don't mean infinite crypto security, I mean crypto security so hard that for all practical purposes it's unbreakable. And I think that's a constant across that particular spectrum.

And the sort of issues you've been raising about what about the other end, what about malleable, plastic, low crypto versions of this, low security versions, is something that is crossing at another angle to both sides of that spectrum. Yeah, yeah, good point. What about political alignment of cryptography?

I mean, it can sound very democratic idea that anybody can vote and every vote counts and no vote can be fake. But I know that you are not a big fan of democracy, so how do you see ceases? Or you don't think that cryptography has any political applyment? I mean not influence on politics, I mean only applyment.

I think this is a huge issue if anyone is interested in talking about the politics of Bitcoin. It gets back to me to this thing about peer-to-peer. I think it's the fundamental ideological fork of modernity, that if you say we're aiming for pure, uncontaminated peer-to-peer relations, what is the ideology of that claim? Which, as I've said before, it seems to me like that is the teleological omega commitment all deepest modern tradition and I think it goes its

radically because and and all of all political language splits with their and and the language of democracy a who can be used as an example this for sure like is a is a flat its flat in this strict can't you and transcendence and flat because the fact there's no transcendent oversight there's nothing stunning above in on this metaphysical level above the transactional bond between two nodes that are not defined at all except imminently by the fact that their nodes within the system those nodes can interact fluidly without any interruption from external

thing now is that a democratic or an anti-democratic relation and I think that both sides need to be taken extremely seriously you know when when in the deepest and most classical sense the liberal tradition holds itself to be profoundly democratic I don't think that simply reasonable I think it's something that is a serious claim because it's saying that what that peer-to-peer bond means exactly in the terms you say every node is formally privileged to the exact same extent within that

system but equally when you've got these left critiques all serious left critiques are left critiques all liberalism in this again classical set and they say as Marx does explicitly I'm you know no that peer-to-peer bond is what allows any amount of subs and show difference to be accumulated without interruption or without objection so that as soon as you totally formalize that relations appear to pay relationship all the things that are counted in the left critique of classical liberalism as forms of social and economic violence is opened you know the Pandora's box is open

to anything can happen and cannot be stopped there's no agencies then that can police or interfere from outside you can enter into any transactional relationship and the substantial outcome of that relationship can be anything at all there are simply no limits and there's no substantial limits to what that can entertain so I think you know my response to this is to say both sides are interesting and important and the languages split in half in an extremely interesting way like this you know I saw on Friday a kind of Bitcoin promo video

that totally is using this language and it's saying 0 you know Bitcoin is this new super democratic a mode of a financial organization because everyone gets a fight and then the next day well you know you can't have that it's one person one because anyone any person could easily proliferate a whole bunch of false identity couldn't be checked someone could make up a million false personal IDs and therefore have a million votes so you can't do that practically so therefore you have and this is what we're gonna talk about next week I she therefore you have to prove work system and therefore the boat is actually based on the computing power

that is available to that node and as we can see substantially the did variation in the computing power available to different nodes is open ended I mean you know one node can be a Bitcoin mining super entity hidden somewhere in the depths of China producing thousands of bitcoins every hour and another node is someone who just has a Bitcoin wallet and and a mobile phone and has effectively zero mining capacity so obviously from the left you'd say well this is farcical to call this democracy I mean

it's like what he you even thinking is a great now I don't want to be an ambiguous about it at at all and I I think it I think the ambiguity is is crucial because you have to understand it's not an accident and I don't even think it's maliciously ideologically deceptive of that video to be using that language you know I don't think it's talking about democracy just in order to pull the wall over people's eyes I think they really it's based on a deep belief and a deep historically rooted sense of what democracy is and where it comes from that is pushed into a certain extreme crisis by the purity

that has now entered in in terms of the differential between the formal and substantial characteristics of the relationship. So as soon as you really have something that is a pure peer-to-peer system, you can see how absolutely indifferent that system is to the substantial distribution that is involved in that. And so far, you know, it's... I think all these things are happening at the same time. It reminds me a little bit of Bolshevism, especially Lenin.

If we take Lenin's text beyond its aims, I mean, if we totally forget about socialistic ideas, about the aim to create the communistic society, Beyond all that, Bolshevist tactics, it sounds very alike what you said now. You couldn't just expand on that a bit, could you? Excuse me?

Could you just expand a little bit, like when you say it sounds very much alike? So, if we take the existence of Bolshevist party, beyond its ideology and aims, we'll see that they never had only one part. For example, Lenin insisted that communists must avoid only left part, only left way, and they must avoid only right way.

anything goes, anything goes which can help, which can continue the existence of the party and which will increase its power. And it is not important, the ways are not really important. And he insisted that we can work in, we are Marxists, we can be against liberalism, against parliamentarism and so on. But if we want to win, we must, sometimes we must go to the parliament and walk in the parliament.

Even it's a very reactionary parliament. if we want to win we need to to find allies among liberals even if we understand that they are our enemies and so on. Right. But to be honest this sounds to me almost... it would be easier to see that as the opposite than as something analogous. I'll tell you why I think that because let's just treat the Bitcoin protocol as an omega instantiation of the classical liberal model which I as I say characterized by this pure

purely formalistic peer-to-peer relation defended against any kind of encroachment so it's a politically closed commercially open system now and all of the ambiguity is that then emerge from that come from its absolute principle formalism you could you can absolutely loathe and despise that formalism and that principle of course you know you can critique it as we I don't know whether we're going to get onto the Brett Scott thing but he is a very interesting left critic of Bitcoin and I think he can probably be constructed in this kind of way I have to see how that would

roll out discussion but it's not at all opportunistic there's no opportunism in fact this it's the zero opportunism the absolute inflexibility of its principle that is the target of what would be and I think already is a left critique you know the critique of if it's broadened apt in abstraction to algorithmic government where the rules the principles the laws simply cannot be violated irrespective of their substantial outcomes so even you know whatever it leads to substantially it still is immune from any kind of

modification or social answerability as no it's structurally incapable of being I'm adapted to deal with its stops I'm sure or in response to a substantial comes whereas it sounds to me that the Lenin position that you're a laying out there is the opposite is hyper opportunistic in the sense that it's saying that there's a certain substantial out that is our commitment and what ever for procedures are required to reach that substantial outcome should be tolerate if the substantial outcome that is the guideline on the principal and there are no formal restraints you know any kind of alliance across ideological

boundaries is fine and as long as we keep ourselves focused on the desired substantial result so in terms of this basic this basic question about hyper-formalism and its kinda realization the Bitcoin protocol seems to me that the Leninist situation is the exact opposite that well I I can't the I'm so you right now 0 0 I it because I need

the little bit more I I need better understanding all the coin seems sure Well, let's, I think, as I say, we've got a kind of politics block set up in advance for next week. So we can definitely throw some Lenin into that for sure. I mean, if there was any particular text that you thought was particularly relevant to that, then you can stick it up on the classroom and everyone can have a look at it for sure. Well, okay. Thank you.

I had a question about the point you just made, Nick, and that you made it also at the beginning, the fact that Bitcoin is politically closed and commercially open, right? Right. But my question is what kind of market is Bitcoin actually creating, or has created creating or has created so far because like, promising that I don't hate the Bitcoin formalism, I actually love it and I think I don't particularly like it. Where is it situated here obviously? So my question is the kind of market and commerce that Bitcoin is creating so far anyway is still very much dependent on perhaps what I see or I understand as that kind of transcendental entity, which is the US dollar, right?

So any kind of commercial, speculative, generally financial venture that is like, I don't know, undertaken these days, involving Bitcoin is generally related or is generally compared somehow or depending on the price of the dollar, right? Or the price of Bitcoin compared to the dollar. So this is where, I don't know, I'm sorry I keep nagging about, I don't know what's outside of the formalism of Bitcoin, but I think you cannot not take that into account. I mean, unfortunately, because, again, I think the formalism of the blockchain is, I don't know, it's amazing and it has a lot of potential,

but unfortunately what I see, again, it's like a series of, I don't know, it's a big, I don't know, capture of perhaps this, I don't know, the surplus of the blockchain in terms of what it offers, in terms of, as you were saying, like the open secret of, I don't know, this new kind of like cryptographic communication. So I don't know if you have any, I don't know, any comments on this area of, yeah. Yeah, no, I do have a comment for sure. I mean, first of all, I think this is like super important. And I think there's two things I'd just immediately say in relation to the point you've just made. The first is that the relation to the US dollar seems to me almost entirely a straightforward consequence of the position of the US dollar in the world.

You know, like why do people fundamentally quote the price of Bitcoin in US dollars? But isn't it the same as the reason they quote the price of oil in dollars and they quote the price of gold in dollars and the price of everything in dollars? It's because of the position of the U.S. dollar in the world. It doesn't seem to me at all that this isn't an artifact that's coming from the side of Bitcoin. It's that simply Bitcoin has arisen in a world in which the U.S. dollar is the international reserve currency however sort of unstably right now and therefore we automatically talk about it in those terms that insofar as Bitcoin is going to either whatever Bitcoin does to

the world financial system is going to be something it does to the US dollar first of all because the world the US dollar simply represents the world financial system and And the second point is also the big complication, just on a concrete level of what you said, would have been China. Like when Bitcoin was big in China, it was dwarfing everything else. I could see it live. You know, there's... I'll try and find the link for this. You can go to a site and it just shows you in real time the Bitcoin activity in the world. these Chinese Bitcoin exchanges were just glowing incandescently and overwhelming everything else you know and uh...

and for that's for a lot the Chinese economy is weirdly virtualized in terms of money like the amount of online financial transactions that happen in terms of just retail in China is fast you know and and break brick-and-mortar retailers in China are really threatened actually by this. As a marketplace in this just absolutely straightforward sense of just buying a baby's diapers over the net China is just extraordinary place. So there's that factor but more importantly is there is so much hot corrupt money and money laundering demand in China it's unbelievable. so you know the traditional ways it's obviously

Macau is the world's greatest gambling set now because you have party officials turning up in Macau with a suitcases of a hot money that they want to you know under through the gaming tables and if they only get half it back that's fine you know it's a and and Bitcoin for a long time seemed to be just really nice low-cost money laundering facility that totally fitted into that demand so for both of those reasons it was it was just huge and and as I say just dwarfing Bitcoin activity in other centers but then obviously that it I think that

Chinese financial authorities really didn't like what seemed to be things slipping out of their control in this way and they stamped down pretty hard on it and people have said I think persuasively that that basic market pattern of Bitcoin that it goes up to over a hundred what $1,100 and then crashes down to its current level of a bit over 200 or whatever is totally based upon Chinese the Chinese authorities. So I think the fact that we've seen 80% or something close to that of the Bitcoin value being vaporized by perhaps, I mean I'm not saying this is dogmatically certain, but let's just hypothetically say because of Chinese state intervention is some indication of what

was happening previously there I think. Yeah. But so, yeah. No, I totally agree with you. But again, I don't know, when we talk about the value of Bitcoin, we still talk about the value of Bitcoin against the dollar. One Bitcoin is still one Bitcoin, right? I don't know. I still have, I don't know, troubles to, I don't know, to divorce the idea of, you know, like analysis of Bitcoin. Right, yes. From the rest that it's embedded in. And I guess it perhaps relates to the link that Ivan posted about the pricing surface of the market.

Because in my opinion, we would have a very different pricing surface of the source use like if you know if it were according to the logics of the blockchain unfortunately there's no pressing surface in terms of Bitcoin to my I don't know the way I see it it would be perhaps something different I don't know I'm just yeah well I think the thing is that get the absolute formalism a pic corin means that it's not ever gonna do people's political work for them unless their political work is for algorithmic government you know it if if the Chinese

if the UN dominated the world in the way the dollar does then we would be thinking up that Bitcoin in UN or whatever it is going to be you know Bitcoin is just intrinsically absolutely neutral about that and obviously that's again one of these ambivalent things that one can take that as the basis of a critical start simulation to it or one can celebrate that and you know it in itself is just a fact about this a purely formal system is that it's not going to it's not going to take sides in a certain way you know it's only when you set up the deep ideological issue that the stance of algorithmic neutrality is itself a politics

and therefore a side which I think is highly defensible but it's only then that it is caught within this system of ideological antagonism and once you're at a more concrete level about the particular structures of the world order it's going to be neutral on that, however frustratingly that might be. Yeah, I actually agree with you on the fact that I don't know, I tend to think that there is economics in itself, it's a politica perhaps and it's up to the sort of political formations that take up certain, like, I don't know. I mean, economics, I think, the way, I don't know,

I guess it says, like, economics as a tool of certain, like, political, I don't know, projects. But in itself, perhaps, it's, I don't know. I don't, I don't, I struggle to agree with, I don't know, positions that see money as intrinsically political, for instance. I don't know. I tend to say the other way around. but again, I don't know. Right. I tend to, I don't know, I still can, I don't know, make up my mind on a lot of things, I guess. Yeah, so it's interesting. I mean, this obviously then intersects with the Brett Scott piece you linked to. And it is very interesting.

I mean, I'm not sure really, this might be too big a thing to throw in here now. but in his first point this money emerges from Barter point that for him is a myth obviously and it's referring to what I think is one of the most interesting whether it's really developed enough to call it a dispute it's more of an intrinsic antagonism that hasn't really been worked out argumentatively between the position that really comes from Karl Menger and is treated by the Austrians as their kind of gospel money, which is this

barter position that shows money by solving the problem that is called technically the double coincidence of wants in barter systems you get to a money system and gold is then adopted as that currency of choice and remains for the Austrians obviously the model the model money as a as a valuable commodity which is then taking it to a second life and the much more recent and you know I think a lot of people very attractive an interesting position of David Graber which is refusing that model and which actually Brett Scott I think a bit hastily is taking as gospel on the other side which he seems to just say look it's now proven anthropologically that

money does not arise from part. I mean to me that is vastly fast and I have to sort of see it as a political choice rather than a theoretical choice. But I think both of those positions are very important and need to be fully explicated and they both pull out very interesting things. I mean obviously what David Graeber is saying is that the state debt are always intrinsic to these money systems and if you have a large scale standardized system of money that's already intrinsically involving these kinds of institutions and that's a point that I think is

unquestionably important to make but if we did get a chance to dig into this kind of exchange the text that I really want to make sure people have seen because I think it's but also crucially important is this Nick Schabo paper called shelling out and I sort of pushed it hard on early reading lists because I think that the Nick Schabo position really doesn't easily get captured by that opposition I think for one thing it's goes back very very far me takes it right into sort of the paleolithic deep paleolithic and sort of human early human evolution

so it sort of it it the sort of David Graeber anthropological history move just doesn't get any purchase on it and it manages to capture it I think important phenomena from both sides at it shows how money is tied up with notions of debt right from the start and it also shows how money resolves these barter problems so I think yeah I think that is a very interesting triangle but I'm probably going I'm going beyond what we can digest in this at this point here tonight

yeah started the last time I I'm great and I really enjoyed Nick Schaeber paper, because I guess that's a bit, he's got a position a bit more like Mangerian, right? Like, he's, I don't know, he tends to see it more like in the Austrian way, from my understanding. But on the other side, the way that he describes the way in which Marning, like, sort of was, I don't know, originated, it makes sense. is that it's a perfect useful tool that facilitates exchange without creating this dynamics of accumulation.

And obviously, it was again polyolithic. But again, I don't know. This is my point. I don't know. I tend not to agree with all the positions, or the leftist critique of Bitcoin, but on the other side, I don't really consider myself like a libertarian or a quick ton of kids on the other side. But I find it, I don't know, right, because the blockchain, right, is neutral. I find it quite frustrating, I don't know, the fact that there hasn't been, I don't know, it hasn't been possible to create perhaps a system that again makes sense the same way

that perhaps the ancient like protomanies made sense in those days, the kind of collectibles obviously we're not talking about collectibles like now but I don't know, like it seems to me that the direction we're going now also with the like peer-to-peer kind of like political perhaps, I don't know, formalism, I mean, apolitical, but still, I don't know, finally managing, doing with that or eliminating the third, the transcendental, third party, it seems to me that it's moving increasingly in the direction of the neoliberal, not the

neoliberal, the liberal, the traditional classical economic system of doing away with the, I mean, of, I don't know, the invisible hand of the market. So, I don't know, I guess I'm trying to look for an alternative, but I don't know. Yes. Yes. I mean, it is very, it's a very interesting thing, and there obviously is some very smart writing happening all around this this topic and I think the thing is there's a really difficult for the left side this discussion there's a very difficult problem which is to do with the

game theoretical use of money because because I'm everybody wants other people's money to be political and their own money to be apolitical I mean no one has a game theoretical interest in the politicization of their own money you know and so obviously these left these left positions really require people to enter into well I think it might be I mean I might be being overhasty if I say unrealistic games their radical positions but their positions that certainly require a

very large degree all collective purpose being I'm operational in people's choice of a money system and operation of a a money system and you know you go back to this sort of them that the shape of thing and I agree that he tends to be in this lineage I think obviously the tech this whole cypherpunk cryptographic game theoretical thread is very tends to be very cozy with austrian a economic ideas because I think they I think they share a lot of the same

assumptions about agents and what counts as kind of local rationality for nature and so they will expect they won't count a theory as being attractive to them unless it works in a situation where the agents in that system up shooting quite narrowly conceived self-interest you know so that of the it puts them in on a certain side of the political spectrum and but the the shape of thing like it it goes so deep into this biological

I mean really is on the on the cusp is now the emergence of the human species being tied up with this the disuse collectibles and he's got a kind of it's a hypothetical claim I'm assuming well than a particular strong but is extremely provocative which is that Neanderthals would probably smarter than modern humans but they didn't operate with collectibles say that that the the kind of evolutionary advantage given to our ancestors by these forms of proto currency was so overwhelming that it allowed for the complete displacement of an actually

in one narrowly defined it's cognitively superior species and so sorry I'm rambling what I really wanted to wanted to catch was was just this game theory element of it you know where it's all cashed out in this extremely basic these extremely basic imperatives to do with with just feeding feeding your came really I mean you're trying it can be extended to for sure but you know who east as the thing about these collectibles is the actually workers like factors helps and you know because you're only you'll knocking out a mammoth

a month or something like bad and just three weeks you don't have enough it and if you can engage in exchange relationship with another group just happened to be out of sync with you in the hunting pattern you just simply have I'm nourishment that would not be available to you under these other circumstances so that level of just you know raw incentives is obviously watch people are up against on the other side if they're trying to kind of use money as a tool some Barry highly theorized a person current collective endeavor or something car yeah thank you

I mean it's not clear to me for instance in Graeber's work what his positive suggestion is anything like us it's not as clear as his critiques at I mean I don't know where to people to scream at are you know he he obviously he wants to criticize a whole all stations money that would tend to legitimize it as a as a excess

and I'm sure would be extremely critical a Bitcoin what's behind it but in terms of what he's posing as a monetary regime it seems me get the picture to focus Thank you.

Okay, maybe the last thing, if no one else. I had another question regarding the, like, I don't know, game theory and, I don't know, which again was in the next piece, together with the... He was referring to evolutionary, I don't know, evolutionary theory, like... And it seems to me that, I mean, game theory,

as much as this evolutionary theory based again on the principle of the selfish gene, right, that works more or less, and making strategic decisions based on game theory, isn't that a bit reductive? I mean, it's just the model, right? So it's inherently reductive. I mean, game theory is a model of the decision process. I guess, obviously, there are so many factors that intervene in forming decisions. So even there, I don't know, I find it hard to accept,

which was in fact my one, perhaps, question in the next several piece, is, I don't know, reliance on game theory and on evolution theory based on game theory again. Yeah. I mean. Yeah. But I think this is why, and again, I saw a piece recently it's a bit it's a bit off our topic because it's a general critique of what they call neoliberalism but it really I was fascinating because it draws the genealogy of or a neoliberalism as it calls it through this game theory tradition in a way that I've never seen done so clearly before and for instance John Nash

who's critical in our tradition and her but to master care some people even said at a bit crazily probably but that even said maybe satoshi nakamoto is John Nash that's how close it and and to put that tradition going through Thomas Schelling and all of the game theoretical process then going into public choice there in all of this as being the core intellectual momentum heading into what we now see all or is being denounced obviously as this neoliberal political and economic culture and I thought it was very interestingly done and so I think for sure you know

it's probably necessary to in a game theory is probably this crucial nexus as you say for these for this political decision-making you know And the people, I think, who were involved with just because they're the Bitcoin people, they like game theory because it's formalistic. You know, just like the protocol itself, you have nodes, you have agents, you don't have to specify anything about them, except that they will play to win rationally. and I don't think the assumption there which is again obviously derided

as kind of isomorphic with notions of homo economicus even with the notion of perfect markets with a whole series of these apatical constructs or regulative ideas but I don't think it's saying people are rational, it's saying that selective pressure is directed towards the rewarding of rationality, that whoever plays this game rationally will win. So in these game theoretical setups, whether it's Prisoner's Dilemma or any of the chicken or any of these kind of things, it's not to say we are going to assume axiomatically

that the agents involved are rational. it's rather that this is the framework of this game and if you don't play it rationally you will lose this game and when you then translate that into a sort of in the broader sense Darwinian framework obviously most comfortably in biology but then these analogies between Darwinian evolution and structures of kind of competitive market economics are not trivial. I mean, there's something going on there because when you translate it into biological terms, this claim the rational player will win becomes something that you're actually plugging into this

selective machine your reality you know so you say that this is why biologists it's no coincidence that game theory has proven to be an extremely useful tool for them because if you're going to be Darwinian at all and you're going to say that there is there is a process of natural selection of successful strategies then game theory is just saying well look let's formalize what is a successful strategy and we would expect therefore that in all of these examples

wherever we're looking you know even at the most elementary organism an organism that is bad at playing games, and game theory tells you what that is, will be selected out. So that competence, game theoretical competence, is something you would expect to be selected for by any kind of Darwinian mechanism, whatever level that is operating at. So I think that's where, for instance, Nick Schabo is coming from. Thanks. up

So this is a question completely out of some kind of like hazy space. Right, good. Doesn't that suppose a kind of a particular account of reason? That it's instrumental in order to play the game? And I wonder maybe if... Right. If you thought about this kind of instrumental kind of discourses,

it's also the kind of reason that to me seems to be prevalent in places like Less Wrong in the way that reason is talked about there. Compared to the kind of reason that... Sorry, sorry, I just missed that. Prevalent where? In West Rom, that sounds like to me. In where? Less Rom, the blog. Oh, yes, you know, that rationalist. Yeah, absolutely. I'm sure there's a big micro-sociological intersection between those guys. Or maybe not big, actually, because when you actually... The ideological surveys of left-est, wrong-law is always weirdly left-est, actually. But that surprises me. Yeah. But there's still a particular account of reason that's operative here. Right, sure. And it is, I think, an instrumental account.

Yeah. And I was wondering if you'd thought about alternative accounts of reason. And I mean, to kind of give a fuzzy indication of where I'm heading with this without having I'm not going to actually sit and explain it right now. Towards Peirce, towards the kind of stuff that Reznor Garistani is talking about, and Ray Brassier and other people. This autonomous reason, which definitely returns to a pseudo-Hegelian idea, like an autonomous unfolding. Reason that one is completely transcendental. Yeah. Okay, sorry, I know I'm interrupting you, but I'm just my big question then is like

has that broken totally with naturalism like is if I was then to say well how could such a thing cut like if I say look reason only exists because it's instrumental it's not because there's some notion of instrumental reason that is preferred in advance it's just that the instrumentality of reason is the actual condition of possibility for reason existing at all within a naturalistic Darwinian framework if reason wasn't instrumental it would not exist and accept as maybe some kind of which and you'll mean there are exotic there exotic accounts of how something can somehow slit past natural selection accident

but if this thing is something of huge importance a like almost cosmic significance it seems to me that's a weak foundation to rest on and so you really want to say well how naturalistically could this thing possibly have come to be now obviously that's why instrumental reason is is the is the way it is and why it's defined the way it is and how it how it's defined is that it's that thing it's that characteristic of reason that allows reason to be selected for and if you take that away, where has reason come from? Why

should it exist? How could it exist? Yes. Mo, was that you? Indeed it was. I don't know if you want to elaborate on that. This question and answer clarified so much for me. But okay, so two things. There's an account, for example, in Cellars about how reason, the kind of autonomous reason that is distinguished from instrumental reason actually does evolve completely through natural

selection via kind of like pattern recognition and kind of develops like a conceptual ability on top of that basic kind of instrumental reason, which leads it to the... Okay. ...developed concepts. And then allows a kind of a completely pragmatic use of this particular faculty in order to kind of, you know, you don't have to posit a gap between natural selection and the laws of nature and conceptual reasoning.

But look, I'm partly just confessing my ignorance of this tradition, but if it's the case that this other non-instrumental reason, inverted commas, emerged out of pattern recognition, isn't that totally instrumental? I mean, pattern recognition is... There's pattern recognition because pattern recognition is instrumental. I mean, if pattern recognition without instrumental value would also not have any selective reinforcement and would pose the same problem that we're starting off with here.

So I don't know how you've moved beyond instrumentality. I mean, it's like, the very moment something starts happening that is non-instrumental, it is no longer subject to Darwinian reinforcement, and therefore its existence becomes miraculous in a naturalistic sense. So maybe, can I just interject here? Yeah, sure. So maybe here what we're talking about is like the liminality between instrumental reason and instrumentalized reason. It's the ED that kind of like make a difference between what Amy is sort of like critiquing

and what you're reasserting. So instrumental reason and instrumentalized reason. the ED makes it sort of like a sinister human agency that's trying to somehow actually take the instrumental reason and totally distort it and put it towards particular agendas. I don't know if it was helpful or useful what I said, but I'm asking that. Would Amy be prepared to go along with that, I wonder? I mean... I'm not sure I understand exactly what you're getting at, Mo, but the thing that jumped to mind when you were saying that was the distinction that Reza makes, probably coming

from someone else. Reza's distinction is always instrumentalized reason, I think, from what I remember. I don't know, maybe we should get Reza in here. Yeah, totally. Where's Reza? instrumental reason because the way the way you brought the pattern recognition example and basically how reason proceeds is through instrumentality I mean that's why I thought like Nick was like really right on when he said that like I said I'm just I'm just chucking this out there because it um into my mind when you guys were talking about the kind of the agent of this particular theorizations of economics and I wanted

yeah I think it's helped out a completely neutral position as well from observing the way that these two discourses kind of antagonize each other sure it's very helpful and to be honest though I'm my question remains the same is is whether the claim to a non-instrumental rationality so this isn't Moe's distinction this is the one that I thought was at play here, whether that involves an explicit repudiation of Darwinian naturalism, or whether it somehow thinks that it is compatible with that naturalistic

framework. So that's something I'm just not clear about. But if it is compatible, then it's hard to see how you could have leverage against this role that game theory is playing in these discussions. Because game theory, at its most abstract level, is simply attaching itself to the instrumentality of reason. notion of rationality in it that is anything other than that way of processing a problem that will lead to winning games or arriving at optimal outcomes in games. And those games,

obviously, when you put it into this deeper naturalistic context, are just these survival games. Therefore, winning those games is simply a precondition of existing in the first place within this naturalistic grid. A tradition or heritage of having orientation such that games have been won over the last four billion years is how everything has been put together within this framework. So if you're going to say that this game-theoretic framework is somehow a limited one, then that

seems to me to appeal to some foundation of existence that is radically independent of this kind of naturalistic process. I don't want to put words in anyone's mouth but I think that the account goes that this kind of conceptualization is consonant with the emergence of consciousness, natural selection, of like the emergence of consciousness, natural selection, and instrumental reason. It doesn't exclude it in any way. But it then provides a layer on top of that. This is the sticking point which corresponds with human agency, which gives agency over

and above natural laws. that there is a way of intervening and manipulating them that allows traction in order to divert, you know, whatever the universe is doing towards a different end. And this is where you get what looks like the imposition of a bunch of transcendent regulations, except that if the account is correct, they are emergent from within the transcendental space, game space or whatever. Right. I mean, whether or not that's... how tractable that is is a different question. Yes, I mean it's intriguing, definitely, and obviously the emergentism of it is interesting,

but there's also a kind of paradoxical side to it because, you know, games theory is extremely agent oriented theorizing as that I mean it's really you know that be a I don't think this is used because of the fact that it just is so functional and dull and the Darwinian tradition has now put together such good translation protocols for this but there's at least a a kind of implicit or virtual hyper naturalistic objections the use of games theory in deep biology that would precisely say it's you know aren't you being too teleological

to use these models about rational agents when you're describing the evolution of bacterial nets or I mean I would go in exactly the opposite direction in a way to this to this line of critique and it would say that the games theorists are retrospectively transporting these agency models way beyond their zone of application into systems that obviously not only don't have consciousness or social identities or explicit deliberated purposes but maybe don't have any kind of nervous system whatsoever and so what I'm saying there is

you know with this supervenient layer of non instrumental rationality being pre being postulated in the name of agency how is that producing kinda leverage on the theory of games it seems it seems that the theory of games is already like talking about agents almost to a fault I suppose that it just means that it's not the only paradigm within which to work that it provides one but you could perhaps I don't know build an economics on a normative paradigm

to bring out the N word but yeah I mean yeah I really I am just kinda like throwing knives into the dark right here yeah I mean a very interesting night I apologize that my incompetence to to can catch them properly equally I mean you know I find this kinda hazy hey get yeah it's very hard to very hard to process adequately so it would be interesting to yeah well it is called the or the there's that aphorism like entering the game of giving and asking for reasons space reasons whatever and

and that synoptic picturing talking to sellers now a scientific image whatever it is rule based you know whether these rules are those of game theory is doubtful, but like, you know, the rule pattern process layering of that autonomous reason does seem fairly instrumental, I think, so it's interesting to think about in that way, too. Yeah. Mo, you have something to say about this.

Well, I actually was just thinking about what you were saying, so give me a couple of minutes to see what I can think of, because I immediately noticed what you were saying was already kind of pointing to me. Yeah, well, I mean, it's just… The way for me to collapse it into this conversation or into the conversation about games or conversation about instrumentality is to think a little bit like, what do you call it, STS and science studies and how the intersubjectivity of the establishment of what is the scientific image, goes into each disciplines on reliance still on manifest image to even come up

with scientific models and then what it takes at the level of meta science or philosophy for these disciplinal images that are still quasi manifest to sort of like leave their manifest residues and kind of like come together and be telescope together into a scientific image these things don't do not happen in a vacuum right and it all involves some form of like instrumentalization and game playing and kind of like building of intersubjectivity takes all sorts of like rules and games and I mean that's what I can think of

right now to relate sellers to the conversation, right? And see if a Salarsian idea of rationality is compatible with what Nick is talking about in terms of instrumental reason. Yeah. Yeah, I think. Sorry. If I'm understanding this right, it would have to be that this this Salazian superstructure could it would not be reducible to saying its criterion

for validity or its criterion for let's just say its ultimate criterion of this rationality would not be reducible to the fact that it is a game-winning orientation. I mean, obviously my sort of natural inclination here, and you can take natural as deliberated as possible, is to sort of think that what's been postulated is almost some kind of inflection point of species suicide at which the successfulness, the actual, the instrumental value of its cognitive

processes are somehow cross this threshold and cease to be a criteria. And it opens up this wonderful domain of dysfunctional cognition that can be completely incompatible with these naturalistic conditions of preservation and perpetuation and allow obviously all kinds of things you know and you can respond oh you know the fact that this is losing this is losing the game does not matter. You're not understanding. This is a meta-instrumental transcendent normative rationality. You're not getting at its value, at its importance,

at its emancipatory power if you're reducing it to successfully winning a game. But then, successfully winning a game. But then obviously from the other side one would expect it to therefore tend to lose the game and therefore be edited out of some naturalistically regulated reality. I think the main point is that it doesn't just make game theory a measure of intelligence. It's a kind of intelligence that operates within game theory successfully but then isn't

limited to that kind of intelligence. The ultimate upshot of this is that it becomes a program for an artificial intelligence in all of the people I referred to. So you get a different level of intelligence as your AVI. But that's maybe partly because you don't want that intelligence to be too good at winning games, is that? So in a way, it's a kind of impositional altruism that will prevent this superintelligence being being too good at playing games and therefore being a threat, is that am I just like projecting my own paranoid framework onto this situation?

No, I mean, I think it's developed explicitly as a way out of that paranoid framework. And whether or not that makes it less real is the question. I mean obviously from the side of the paranoid brutalism, given a fragmentary set of development programs, the competitive dynamics between them will favour the kind of raw instrumental versions of intelligence over the normative um...

sort of altruistic versions of intelligence and therefore your your cuddly AI program is nice from the perspective of the humans who are feeling threatened by it but it's it's incompetent in comparison to these more sort of um... just yeah rule came playing intelligences that being put together elsewhere I mean it's really is this thing about whether there is some kind of horizon of the Darwinian criteria do you think that's right yeah

I was gonna ask if you think that the proof of work or intelligence in Bitcoin could evolve in a corresponding manner to this discussion of instrumentality? I mean, or how can mining, I mean, can it just get more and more complicated and can just certain people have developed the capacity for it? Or do you think there's potential for a broadening of that? But then again, that might be leading into what you wanted to talk about. Yeah, I think it does actually a lot. But there's no reason why we can't at least entertain it a little bit. I mean, obviously the interesting thing about this proof-of-work thing

is that it's designed in some ways to preclude intelligence in the sense that if these puzzles that were being solved were such that there was some it was open in principle to some mathematical discovery by an intelligent program that allowed it to massively increase its hashing rate out of proportion to its actual investment of computing power then that would subvert the Bitcoin system. I mean that would put the whole Bitcoin economy in the hands of this super intelligent computer. And so the whole thing has actually been designed to prevent that outcome.

You know, the sort of zone where that type of dynamics could occur, you're out in this space and these other ones. the Bitcoin protocol itself is actually intrinsically protected against super intelligence getting represented in the system. That's fascinating. So it purely… Continue, thank you. yeah I mean that's that's that's it's for sure but I mean it's like the relation between Bitcoin and super intelligence production is certainly going to be

more secure test and complicated and the notion of the young of the actual hashing industry leading up some track towards artificial intelligence which is something that is supposedly been prevented I mean get even if there's mathematical proof in a way in the sense that the problems that up being set that the hash function has to fulfill is one that cannot be resolved except by brute force and therefore in in theory by the most stupid possible the most stupid possible thought process and this is something we find everywhere

obviously it's like a it's the same with the young these asymmetric functions we've been looking at stay in terms of cryptography it's like if there was possible a an intelligent mathematical solution for prime factorization then crypto security would be immediately vaporized unit because someone somewhere could find a way from extracting the two-prime factors from some 256 bit prime number and bang you know you've you've lost your asymmetry immediately and that whole cryptographic system is completely destroyed and

so that to you know the thing about and the the next to their ass toss knees with crimes is it is in the exact same way as his hash functions stupid brute force method that you just try try try try work your way through by trial and error through the whole series until eventually like I'm and obviously because this is something you know also been talking about Darwinian mechanics are up the site just at least to some extent in terms of trial and error child and error systems. Thanks. So I just wanted to say that we got about

five minutes before next time is up. If you guys want to talk about camouflage maybe and I'm really interested in that conversation. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Maybe someone should bring it up. At least maybe as a starting point. Maybe five minutes is not enough. Laura, do you want to talk about camouflage or Amy? I think maybe I talked enough. No, I don't think anyone. I'm the only one who has talked enough. Jake is not with us today, which is kind of like just a big hole in the class without Jake, right? It's like...

Well, the one thing I would say is that I find the camouflage of the blockchain completely uncomplicated. In that it doesn't seem to be... The fact that it doesn't really work on any complex set of levels. It means that its camouflage seems to be, I don't know, not particularly interesting. And I don't know if it would work in that kind of sense. We want to talk about it in those terms. Yes. But, I mean, if the camouflage is between what something is going to be and what it appears

as it is initial stay is that something that could really be denied to Bitcoin I mean it's like I think right across the whole spectrum from deep antagonist and massively enthusiastic fire this at least the understanding that this could be something massive and unpredictable and as you you say what we can see now is something that looks so simple and formulaic that it can be presented in this open source public document so isn't that a kind of camouflage of a kind of virtual event camouflaged as a

as a piece of public open software? Yeah, for sure. I wasn't thinking about it, stupidly. I wasn't thinking about it in terms of temporality. I mean, I think this is this open secret thing to me, is that precisely it always will be open to your kind of objection. The way it hides is not the traditional, it's not traditional camouflage. It doesn't hide by not being seen. It hides by being completely visible, but being in some way twinned to an obscurity by this systematic relationship.

And it seems to me that that's definitely what Bitcoin does. Would that be then... It would suit perhaps the term, it would be more terms, sorry, a kind of steganography than cryptography. a kind of a kind of what? a kind of steganography right so it's something where the thing that's being smuggled in is like the key

I know that doesn't work perhaps because the key in steganography is completely in the open it just needs to be encrypted I don't know, I need to think on that more yes, these different types of obscurity for sure but I mean the I think it's definitely the case that there is this threshold of transition that is marked by this history of cryptography where a certain it previously was the case that something was encrypted if the the encryption if the cipher was simply hidden you know it was conspirator it was transcendent

in that sense being it's not in circulation its outside as a as a precondition at the system and it has been and it's been shared by conspiracy not by cryptographic communication and then you cross into this whole new regime where I'm which is that regime the open secret where the form of hiding is completely different. And yes, I don't know, I mean, I'm just trying to say I think these questions about camouflage, Well, steganography is like, I can see, sorry I missed here, I think it was Chris saying

about, or was it, gosh sorry, about burrows anyway, Chris saying about burrows, saying draw as little attention to something as possible. So that's kind of the steganography thing, isn't it? where it hides by you not seeing there's anything hidden at all. Now that's very different to the basic type of hiding that we've been looking at this time because everyone knows, if there's a public key, everyone knows there's a private key. So there's no secretion of the secret at all. secret is hidden by this mathematical relationship, not by the fact that you don't know there's

something there. But whether Bitcoin as a whole has some kind of steganographic invisibility to it, because that is implied by your criticism, isn't it? I mean, when you say it's simply you know, my eyes bounce off it dazed with boredom, is this stegmographic relationship, isn't it? To say there's not a... it's not sucking you into it. Yeah, yeah. You turned that around on me completely. Nice. Thanks. Sorry, I wasn't trying to be deliberately sadistic about it.

I thought it was kind of the point, but maybe I'm... No, no, no. I enjoyed it. God, all this, like, Nick's one-liners can all be, like, really popular, like, Facebook statuses. I really enjoyed the one you said earlier on. You said, But I hope I'm not projecting my paranoia framework onto this, for which Amy had a very great opposite response. Anyways, we're now a little bit over, like a few minutes. So if anyone has a final question or comment, this is the time to make it.

Or we can maybe end on this note. Yeah. I mean, I've got a lot of things going on in the sidebar that I'd definitely be interested to follow up. I'm actually copying it right now to paste it in the classroom. Yeah. I didn't lose the session today, so I'm able to do it myself. And I'm doing it right now. Okay, yeah, that's greatly appreciated. Do you think that Jake's away because he exhausted himself so badly by putting up the information last week? Could be, but I also try to contact him, but he probably just caught up somewhere,

and he's going to have to watch it if he wants to contact him. I'm sure he will. I tried to message him earlier on, but he didn't respond, and he didn't look at a message, So I'm sure he's not around. Right. Yeah, no problem. OK, so thanks everyone for participation. Thank you so much, Nick, for this great module. Yeah, thank everybody a lot for this. And I'm sorry if it seemed a bit chopped up compared. Sometimes we get total flow, and sometimes there's some choppiness to it. But I've got a lot out of this, so I'm very grateful to everybody. OK, so I'm going to end the broadcast.

And see you all next week, 10 a.m. Eastern Standard Time, for the second-to-last seminar. OK, great. Bye-bye. Thanks, everybody. Bye, have a good week.